Is your business website just there – or is it a real online presence? To reap the benefits of what online marketing has to offer, you need to stand out from the competition – and that means increasing your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) ranking so your products or services rise to the top like proverbial cream. The good news is – this isn’t impossible and it doesn’t require a huge marketing budget. All you need is time, fresh content, and a strong message.

Like Google, Facebook uses a mix of bid price and relevance scoring to determine which ads to show. Starting this week, as an incentive for advertisers to improve the quality and relevance of their ads, the company is going to expose “relevance scores” (RS) to marketers.

Facebook’s newly exposed RS is effectively an estimate of the ad’s targeted alignment with its intended audience. Facebook believes the exposure of RS will produce a “win-win-win.” Better ads will be more interesting to audiences, perform better for marketers and generate more revenue ultimately for Facebook.

Getting the attention of a high-profile or high-impact individual can be a daunting task. Say, for example, that you want to get an important CEO or investor to notice your startup. How would you go about doing this? Sure, cold-calling/-mailing is one way, but that probably won’t be very effective. Here’s a clever little ‘hack’ that is much more likely to get you there…

Most of us have learned by now that content is the currency of the modern Web. It’s used to earn trust, attention, engagement, and actions from users all around the world by brands and businesses of all sizes. And it often primes your visitors to respond positively to your the conversion optimization tactics you’ve employed on the landing page.

Since we Crazy Eggers are in the business of optimizing every tactic for maximum conversions, it’s important that we take time to design a content strategy that does, in fact, have conversion-oriented goals and drives action.

What a lot of us tend to forget is that there is no default definition or form for ‘content.’ The term encompasses anything and everything from a single social update to original television series and everything in between.

One extension of the content marketing universe that has been growing quickly and quietly is social content. In this post I’ll provide answers and direction to questions like:

What makes social content different from the other content we’re creating?

How can I develop a social content strategy?

What tools do I need to be successful?

How should my strategy evolve over time?

Content in general can be repurposed for a variety of media channels so defining ‘social content’ has less to do with the format and more to do with the purpose.

In my opinion, the primary motivator and focus point should be enhancing the fan/customer relationship and experience with the brand on social media. Other content you create will be focused on growing your audience size, raising awareness, and driving conversions for your business. This content needs to be different.

It’s a fact that all social networks are becoming more and more cluttered with updates from brands and users alike. (If you’re not convinced, just look at the amount of photos taken on Instagram.)

To cut through that clutter, you need something more than cute kitten pictures and memes. You need content that appeals to your specific audience by resonating key elements that factor into their relationship with your brand like common interests, shared pain points, or valuable solutions.

In the 5 months since the launch of my blog I’ve grow my list from zero to 1,634 subscribers. Today, I’m going to show you how to do exactly the same. This 6,000 word case study will walk you step-by-step….click-by-click…through every tactic I used to grow my list. I’ll also reveal the simple post-conversion funnel I use to drive social engagement and instantly connect with my subscribers. Let’s jump in!

It’s been more than 10 months now since Facebook started rolling out Website Custom Audiences. I saw it as a gamechanger at the time, and this powerful tool has not disappointed.

If you aren’t familiar with Website Custom Audiences, it’s time to get familiar. You’re falling behind. In a nutshell, it’s the ability to create Facebook ads that reach specific visitors to your website.

I can’t remember the last time I created a Facebook advertising campaign that didn’t include targeting of my website visitors. It’s probably been 10 months.

The Website Custom Audience is extremely versatile. I use it to build my fan base, drive website traffic, grow my email list and sell. You can use it for just about anything.

But because it’s so versatile, the possibilities are pretty much endless — which makes the thought of remarketing for newbies a bit overwhelming.

That’s why I created this post. I want to cover as many remarketing strategies as possible….

Either way, that’s a pretty significant number of businesses that are having a go at it.

There’s a problem, though. Just because everyone is doing content marketing does not mean that they are winning at content marketing.

According to Content Marketing Institute, only 9% of B2B marketers consider their content marketing efforts to be “very effective.” In other words, all this content production doesn’t seem to be working.

There’s obviously a disconnect between what marketers are doing, and what is actually working. There’s this belief, a correct one, that “content is the present — and future — of marketing.” Marketing gods like Seth Godin have long sung the praises of content. Others declare that “content marketing is dead because now it is simply marketing.”

But is it content marketing working? Just because something is common, popular, or important doesn’t automatically mean that it’s working.

I wrote this article for those businesses who are doing content marketing just like they’ve been told, but aren’t seeing results. They don’t feel like content marketing is effective .

Why isn’t content marketing working for you? Here are a few of the most common reasons. I’ll spend a little bit more time on the first few because they’re the most important. See if you can identify with any of these…

Referral programs are highly cost-effective: Enlisting new Prime members with a referral campaign makes a lot of sense since customer referrals are one of the lowest cost acquisition channels.

What does a referral program look like when it’s built by market leaders?

At ReferralCandy, my team and I have been studying the data of thousands of referral programs. We pore over the data to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

So you can imagine how stoked I was to get the opportunity to study how Amazon, the market leaders in ecommerce, crafted their referral campaign. (After all, Prime has been cited as a great example of a loyalty program, so the folks over there clearly know what they are doing.)

Expert growth hackers set up lean, scalable online sales funnels that get loads of quality traffic and convert prospects into paying customers.

It’s no wonder companies are dying to get their hands on these people: They can scale their product sales online at previously unheard of rates, and keep the ROI steady. But this quality traffic has to come from somewhere, and when there’s no pre-existing stream of visits coming to a landing page, growth hackers use ads.

The first thing we’re going to talk about in this growth hacking series for newbies is ads. They’re the top of any online sales funnel and have the power to separate high-intent traffic from casual browsers, making a true impact on your bottom line. Once you get your ads in place, we’ll publish parts two and three of this series to help you optimize your landing pages and CTA forms with growth-hacking expertise…